Podziękowania i przeprosiny w języku i kulturze japońskiej
Thanking and apologizing in the Japanese language and culture

Summary/Abstract: The article evokes John Austin’s theory of speech acts and its elaboration in the work of Anna Wierzbicka. The latter scholar proposes that the principles on which speech acts are based are different in different cultures, the claim being corroborated by a contrastive study of thanking and apologizing in the Japanese and Polish cultures. Semantic descriptions of three Japanese “linguistic gestures” are presented: arigato gozaimasu – thanking, gomen nasai – apologizing and sumimasen – apologizing or thanking, realized and interpreted in Japanese in a culture-specific manner. Thus, the command of Japanese involves not only the knowledge of vocabulary applied in accordance with the rules of one’s own tongue (purely linguistic competence), but also requires acquisition of communicative and cultural competence.

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